Thomas Chalmers   

Part 2:  Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Edinburgh                                                                                                                                                                                           

   In the autumn of 1814 Glasgow’s Tron Church became vacant and when it was put to a vote, the majority of members of the Town Council (in whose gift was the parish church) voted for Chalmers. He accepted the call and on the 23rd of July 1815, at the age of thirty-five, he was inducted to his new charge. It meant a massive change for him. For the first twelve years of his ministry he had had a small country parish where he knew the people well. Now he was minister of a city parish with between eleven and twelve thousand inhabitants. Expectations were different too and in his early days they were a source of considerable vexation to him.

“This, sir”, he writes, in a letter to a friend, “is a wonderful place, and I am half entertained and half provoked by some of the peculiarities of its people. The peculiarity which bears heaviest upon me is the incessant demand they have, upon all occasions, for the personal attendance of the ministers. They must have four to every funeral, or they do not think it has been genteelly gone through; they must have one or more to the committees of all the societies; they must fall in at every procession…I gave in to all this at first, but I am beginning to keep a suspicious eye upon these repeated demands ever since I sat for an hour in grave deliberation with a number of others upon a subject connected with the property of a corporation, and that subject was a gutter, and the question was whether it should be bought and covered up, or let alone and left to lie open”.

Preaching          

   During his Glasgow days Chalmers’ fame as pulpit orator was at its height and many stories have come down to us about the effects of his preaching. The Tron Church could hold fourteen hundred people and it was crowded to the doors Sunday after Sunday. The crowdedness was vexing to Chalmers and on one occasion at least he took the following (unsuccessful) step to lessen it. His friend and fellow minister, Dr Ralph Wardlaw, heard him preach one evening and afterwards the two men, who lived near each other, walked homeward together. “On the way home”, says Dr. Wardlaw, “he expressed in his pithy manner, his great annoyance at such crowds. ‘I preached the same sermon’, said he, ‘in the morning; and for the very purpose of preventing the oppressive annoyance of such a densely-crowded place, I intimated that I should preach it again in the evening’. And with most ingenuous guilelessness he added, ‘Have you ever tried that plan?’ I did not smile – I laughed outright. ‘No, no’, I replied, ‘my good friend; there are but few of us that are under the necessity of having recourse to the use of means for getting a thin audience’. He enjoyed the joke, and he felt, though he modestly disowned, the compliment”.It was in the course of his Glasgow ministry that Chalmers preached a series of sermons later published under the title, Astronomical Discourses. It had been the custom of the city ministers to preach in turn in the Tron Church every Thursday. On the weeks that Chalmers preached the church was more than ordinarily crowded and he took as his subject what was then an important topic of discussion both in science and apologetics. An objection had been raised to the gospel on account of discoveries made by the telescope. Since the universe was so immense and the earth with its inhabitants inconsequentially small by comparison, it was held to be inconceivable that the Son of God should have intervened in its affairs in the extraordinary way that he did. It was Chalmers’ great object to refute this and he did so by combining popular science and biblical exposition in a way that had never been done in the pulpit before and with an eloquence and passion that were well-nigh overwhelming. The published discourses sold in vast numbers, no fewer than nine editions being required in the first year alone.  

From the first Chalmers read his sermons. It drew from the English Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller, the remark that, “if that man would but throw away his papers in the pulpit, he might be king of Scotland”. Chalmers certainly made the attempt but soon pronounced it a failure. His biographer, James Dodds, explains: “His mind was so full of his subject, yet so mathematically anxious that every premise should be understood, every proof followed, that, without the confining mould of a written composition, he could not restrain and regulate his ideas; he could not keep them in shape and fluxion; and when time was up, he found himself only in the middle of some preliminary explanation…He sometimes compared himself to a bottle full of liquid; when suddenly turned up, it cannot flow from its very fullness, not a drop comes out at first, and for a while only bursts and splutters. He deliberately gave up the attempt to preach extempore and commonly adhered closely to his manuscript”.

But his hearers were far from being the losers by it. “He composed rapidly”, continues Dodds, “and with a constant view to an audience, so that his compositions had all the animation of extempore; and then, from his intensity, and from practice, his reading far transcended any other man’s delivery in fervour and in force. The manuscript was never thought of, as people thrilled under the blaze of that face, and the lightning sweep of that arm. As the old woman said of him, ‘Ah, it’s fell reading yon!’… So impossible is it”, Dodds concludes, “to calculate from ordinary rules, when you have to deal with a man of original power”.

Chalmers was immensely popular, then, as a preacher. He was regarded in fact as the greatest pulpit orator of his age. And God blessed his preaching.  Speaking after Chalmers’ death, the Rev. William Anderson, one of Glasgow’s Secession ministers, said, “Little do many of our religious youth know how much, under God, they are indebted to him. When he first made his appearance in Glasgow, it was as if an angel had visited it. Some of us recollect what was the general state of preaching before that time - solid and Scriptural and argumentative enough, but cold and dry and formal, with little application to the every-day life and feelings of men, and still less accommodation to the advanced literature and science of the age. All this was rectified by his sanctified genius; the mocking of infidelity was quashed, and Christianity lifted up its head in triumph, and with heart greatly enlarged for her evangelical enterprise”. W.G. Blaikie adds his voice: “Under Chalmers the tide of sentiment turned decisively to evangelical religion. Before he came, evangelical preaching had been looked on as a combination of sour fanaticism and weak sentimentalism; under his preaching it attained its true rank and glory as the very essence of the Gospel message”. There were numerous cases, too, of conversion.

Preaching, however, was by no means Chalmers’ only work in Glasgow. As a parish minister he held himself responsible not only for those who attended church but for the people of the parish as a whole. Chalmers’ time in Glasgow was divided between two parishes. From 1815-1819 he served as minister of the Tron Parish and then, from 1819-1823, as minister of the newly formed St. John’s Parish. In both he set himself the mammoth task of caring for the many thousands within the parish bounds, doing all in his power to promote their temporal, educational, and spiritual welfare. It was obviously too much for one man to do alone and therefore one of his first tasks was to gather around him a band of able and willing Christians to assist, something for which Chalmers had a real genius. He himself took as full a part as he could and in later years could speak of “the ten thousand entries I have made at different times into the houses of the poor in Glasgow”.

It is a fascinating period in his life. Chalmers had very definite views on poor relief, for example. One of the reasons that he agreed to take on the newly created parish of St. John’s lay in the freedom that he would have to apply his deeply held principles without constraint. Proper management of the parish’s poor was best done, he was persuaded, through collections at the church door, regular visitation, encouragement, and offers of practical help. He believed that a legal entitlement to relief (through government taxation) did more harm than good. Its tendency was to erode the qualities of independence, spontaneous benevolence, and kindness to poor relations that Chalmers was so anxious to develop and thereby actually increase both pauperism itself and the expense of caring for the poor. There are differing opinions as to just how successful the St. John’s “experiment” actually was. Enormous good, however, was unquestionably done. And nor is the story of it of merely antiquarian interest. In the light of the problems and expense of 21st century welfarism Chalmers’ principles and practices are worthy of careful study.

St. Andrews    

   It came as something of a shock when in 1823, after eight years in Glasgow, Chalmers accepted the professorship of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews University. But there were good reasons for it. First and foremost was his health. The demands on him in Glasgow were so great that if he continued on there a breakdown in health was inevitable. There was also the positive attraction of an academic life. In his early days, as we have noted, it was Chalmers’ chief ambition to be a professor of mathematics. Things, of course, had changed enormously but the life of a professor was still very attractive to him. In later years he could speak of “the rooted preference which I have ever felt for the professorial over the ministerial life”. He believed, too, that the position would actually increase his Christian influence. “Moral philosophy is not theology” – he’s speaking to his fellow workers in St John’s – “but it stands at the entrance of it, and so of all human sciences is the most capable of being turned into an instrument either for guiding aright or for most grievously perverting the minds of those who are to be the religious teachers of the age”. 

To appreciate the significance of what Chalmers is saying we need to bear in mind that all students for the Christian ministry had to study moral philosophy before beginning their divinity studies proper. Here then, in St. Andrews, was a golden opportunity to influence these young men in the right direction and in doing so to advance the interests of the church as a whole. Anti-evangelicalism, too, was peculiarly strong in St. Andrews – so much so that for the spiritual good of his family Chalmers took seats for them in one of the Secession churches. What potential in a powerful evangelical figure like Chalmers for shaping aright the rising generation of ministers! And it happened. “There were not a few who complained, in a rueful way, of Chalmers’s withdrawal from the pulpit”, writes N.L. Walker. “It was indeed a great blow which Glasgow sustained when he was taken away from the peculiar work he had been performing there. But in his case no fair comparison could be made between chair and pulpit. Wherever he went he carried the fire with him; and although in Fife his audiences were smaller, this was also to be said, that they were more select. In St. Andrews he dealt with the men who were to be the future ministers of Scotland; and in acting as he did he told, through his students, upon a whole generation of his countrymen”.

And not only on his own countrymen. After his arrival in St. Andrews Chalmers was asked to become president of a small missionary association which had been formed for the promotion of foreign missions. He gladly accepted. The monthly meetings had been sparsely attended but now they grew so large that they had to be held in the Town Hall. There, month after month, and to crowded audiences, Chalmers would talk about the various missionary societies and the work in which they were engaged. The St. Andrews Seven, by Stuart Piggin and John Roxborogh, documents how significant Chalmers’ involvement in this missionary association proved to be. The sub-title of the book is The Finest Flowering of Missionary Zeal in Scottish History. It tells the story of Chalmers and six of his St. Andrews’ students – Alexander Duff, John Urquhart, John Adam, Robert Nesbitt, William Sinclair Mackay, and John Ewart. These young men were profoundly influenced by Chalmers and, with the exception of John Urquhart, who died before his ambition to serve Christ on the mission field could be realised, all became missionaries to India. It is a remarkable and deeply moving story.

Edinburgh    

  Chalmers’ time in St. Andrews proved to be short for in 1827, four years after his arrival, he was unanimously elected by the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh to the chair of theology at the University of Edinburgh. At the time it was perhaps the most influential and distinguished position a Scottish clergyman could occupy. He took up the post a year later, in November 1828. Leaving the quiet of St. Andrews and plunging, once again, into the life of a busy city admittedly wasn’t easy. But there was no question in Chalmers’ mind as to the rightness of it. Theology was of greater importance than moral philosophy and Edinburgh offered a wider sphere than St. Andrews.

His thinking was the same as when he left Glasgow five years before: “To influence in a right direction a considerable proportion of the future ministers of his native land was, in his judgment, a more important function than to fill one pulpit or superintend one parish anywhere”. That conviction only strengthened with his move to Edinburgh. When, after a year or two, it was proposed that he be presented to the West Church in Greenock, then the most lucrative living in the Church of Scotland, he had no hesitation in declining. His reason was “the firm conviction of the superior importance of a theological chair to any church whatever”. He was at “the fountainhead”, writes one of his biographers, where “it was largely in his power to make or mar the ministry of the immediate future”. By the blessing of God it was in the making of the ministry that he was privileged to share.